Thank you very much brainiac and Paul!
The 3.4/35-70mm is a very nice lens, much better than for example the 24-70L. But it is also clearly not as good as the 21mm Distagon or the 100mm MP (especially the sharpness wide open and the bokeh). That's the reason for me to change to the 50MP.

It certainly has amazing optics, but I never could get used to using it... for some reason. The handling just wasn't there for me. Perhaps when I'm made of more money, I'll think about getting it (again).

Well, it was about time this little gem got some attention. Great photos! I have always considered 35-70 zooms to be boring. I have lately been shooting a lot of landscapes and a 35-70 on FF is a great FL IMO. Paired with a UWA you are good to go.

Ok, got my copy with a cheap adapter. Even though the mechanism / distance scale on the barrel indicates that it is a parfocal lens, I have actually found that I can focus to infinity at 70mm, but not at 35.

Anyway, it was a little bit dark when I went out to take "proper" photos, so all I can share now is a test shot.

Note this is on a 40D, handheld, shutter at 1/400. I think I may get slightly better results if I could go further to infinity (this was at the very stop) so I think I'll get a better (thinner) adapter.

While you may be correct about slightly more contrast, the zoom photos are slightly underexposed. If you equilibrate the exposure on the table top in PP, they look much more similar, and if you add just a touch of contrast with an S curve in lightness channel, they look nearly identical. The same is true on the other thread looking at the MP 50 f/2 with the wood siding. With just a minimal maneuver in PP, the 35-70 looks better than the 50. Would demonstrate it, but I guess that's a no no on the forum.

I understand, but the zoom had a shutter of 1.3 seconds, while the 50 had a shutter speed of 1.6 seconds and is noticeably brighter on my screen, so apples and oranges out of the camera. Same is true for the second set, where they actually had the same aperture setting. The 50 got 4 seconds of shutter, while the zoom had 3.2 seconds. That's a significant difference. That said, I think on the margin you are probably somewhat correct, meaning that 50 is probably slightly more contrasty out of the camera.

One separate thing to keep in mind is that higher contrast is not always better, and not simply because of taste. I believe it's easier to go from moderate contrast to harder contrast in Raw or jpg than it is to go from hard contrast to moderate contrast. That's my intuition on this.

And what we are discussing is really the macro contrast, not the unique Zeiss microcontrast, I believe, in the shots above. Microcontrast in Zeiss and Leica is simply not something we can conjure up in PP, in my experience.